Monday, 12 September 2011

My latest Owl Creation, I dub him "Mr Owl" of course you could just as easily do a Mrs Owl!

- I've been asked to provide a pattern for this Owl, to be honest I don't really follow patterns that often & this owl I created on my own without the use of a pattern! I kind of just experimented with the shape & size I wanted as well as the shape of the ears. I did a bit of googling of hand made owls to check out a few different designs before coming up with my own.

- If you are trully wanting to make a unique one of a kind I would recommend coming up with your own Owl design, you could make him fatter or taller or you could have bigger more pointy ears or flatter rounder ears, the options are endless! of course the eyes are up to you also, make them big & round or smaller, use as many diff fabrics or felts as you wish for the eyes, make them smiling, sleeping or alert eyes! just have fun with it! You could even add eye lashes for a lady owl! Google or Etsy is a great source of inspiration of different Owl designs!

- For those of you after a rough pattern I have drawn up a pattern of my owl, I must say a very ROUGH hand drawn pattern!

1) The owl body is folded in half so all you need to do is fold your fabric in half when you cut the owl out, just keep in mind the lines on the pattern are where you will want to SEW the owl so you will want to cut an extra 1cm around the whole pattern for seam allowance.

2) The wings I found quite difficult to achieve actually! It was quite fiddly to get the rounded edges of the wing sewn properly, I would not recommend doing this scalloped edge wing if you are a beginner sewer as it might cause you more grief then you wish!

Feel free to amend the wings to make them just rounded or pointed instead of scalloped......OR even easier you could add fabric across the breast of the owl on each side to create a set of wings which are folded in front of Mr Owl (instead of flapping outwards)

3) Mr Owl's eyes are all made of felt, I used a round jar lid (or something round in the house) to get the perfect circle shape & have a fiddle to ensure you get the eye shape & size you want! I found the bigger the eyes the more "owl like" your Owl will look!

4) Luckily my Brother Sewing machine has a selection of 70 automatic stitches so I used a fine zigzag or a blanket stitch to sew all my felt eyes on, it was so much quicker and gave a beautifully finished edge, of course I understand not all of us have a machine with the automatic stitches so if you want to spend the time blanket stitching by hand you could OR you could just use a straight stitch or zigzag stitch to sew them on using a normal machine!

5) I sewed the whole eye together first before placing them & attaching to the front body of the Owl, I then sewed the breast piece & lastly the beak to the front of the owl body. (do all of these BEFORE you sew his back on!)

6) Once the whole owl is put together you sew it up almost like a pillow it's just got a square flat bottom and you leave a small section of this unsewed before turning inside out & stuffing the owl ensuring you tightly fill out his ears so they don't go floppy and then hand stitch the whole at the bottom closed.

If anyone would like to e-mail me their finished Owl creations, I would love to post on the blog!! e-mail to: sweetmary@live.com.au - leave a comment on this post so I know to check my e-mail if you've sent me a photo!

About Me

Hello I'm Katie
I'm a portrait, lifestyle and wedding photographer based in Townsville Australia.
I'd like to describe my style as story telling. I love to capture your moments naturally in a documentary style way, photographing all the little details along the way.